Sepinwall on TV: Michael Giacchino and Bear McCreary, score keepers

In the mid-'70s, Michael Giacchino was far from the only kid his age to make homemade movies on an 8mm camera. But he was one of the few to obsess most about the soundtrack.

Giacchino loved to run around his Edgewater Park neighborhood and shoot movies with plot descriptions like "two guys leave Earth and go to the moon and go through some crazy time warp and wind up on a dinosaur planet - where every kid had laser guns." But what he loved most of all was to come home, fire up the editing machine and find the perfect track from his dad's record collection to match to each scene.

"I'd find a bit of score from 'Lawrence of Arabia,' or something from 'The Jungle Book,' and fit it in," Giacchino, 40, recalls. "I was obsessed with putting that music to pictures and making sure that it hit right, and that was a hard thing to do with record players and cassette tapes, to make sure that the score I was cobbling together would change emotionally the way I wanted it to."

Thirty years later, the equipment and budget may have changed, but the job description hasn't. Giacchino makes his living composing music for movies (his "Ratatouille" score was nominated for an Oscar) and for television, where he writes the weekly score for "Lost."

The trend in television music of late has been towards wall-to-wall songs, like on "Grey's Anatomy." But a handful of series still use traditional scores, and some composers - notably Giacchino on "Lost" and Bear McCreary on "Battlestar Galactica" - have been able to do transcendent work in an area that's too often underappreciated. On most TV shows, the music is the most important dramatic element that you notice the least. With "Lost" and "Battlestar," it's impossible not to notice, or to think of either series without some composition or other by Giacchino or McCreary coming into your head.

Giacchino's score, alternately lush, playful and terrifying, is the glue that holds all the disparate tones and genres of "Lost" together. In the show's early days, in particular, much of what the characters were reacting to was unseen or unknown by the viewers, and so all those violins and cellos -- menacing like the strings from "Psycho" or "Jaws" -- had to fill in those mental and emotional gaps.

When "Lost" co-creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof heard Giacchino's initial compositions for the show, "we realized that the show had just picked up its fourteenth series regular - the music," recalls Lindelof. Today, the music is so integral to the storytelling that the "Lost" writers frequently refer to it in script directions as shorthand for the tone of a scene: The Giacchino begins to slowly thrump as Locke walks towards the sound of the chopping.

"Battlestar Galactica," meanwhile, features spaceships and killer robots, but in every other way tries to rebel against the usual aesthetics of filmed science fiction, nowhere moreso than in McCreary's score, full of exotic instruments (a duduk here, an erhu there) and counter-intuitive choices (the destruction of a key enemy installation in a recent episode, rather than greeted with triumphant horns, was instead accompanied by a funeral dirge).

"The music of the show was originally based in the idea of minimalism," says McCreary, 29. "It was based in reaction to 'Star Wars' and 'Star Trek,' the trumpet bombast that we associate with space operas."

The music, and McCreary's role on the show, was particularly minimalist at the start. But as "Battlestar" has moved along, McCreary, like Giacchino, began developing themes for different characters that helped define how viewers, and even the writers, began to think of them. He wrote a sentimental, Celtic-tinged theme for the relationship between Edward James Olmos' Admiral Adama and his son Lee (Jamie Bamber); though Adama had to that point been written as very stern and cold. As the writers began to thaw him and his feelings towards Lee, "I had a theme to draw from."

In recent seasons, McCreary's music has even become a part of the plot. At the end of the third season, "Galactica" producer Ronald D. Moore wanted to use Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" as the song that four human characters would hear to realize that they were really robotic Cylons. He tasked McCreary - without telling him what the story was - with penning a version of the song that didn't sound like Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix, but "like 'Galactica.'"

Working blind, McCreary cooked up a version that was equal parts Middle Eastern and heavy metal, and Moore liked it so much that it became far more prominent than originally planned. This past season, McCreary was asked to write an opera song for one character to sing while recovering from the loss of a limb, and the writers have come up with a musician character for the final batch of episodes (due sometime in 2009) who's loosely modeled on McCreary.

Similarly, as "Lost" went on, Lindelof and fellow showrunner Carlton Cuse leaned on Giacchino more and more, often trusting him with long stretches featuring little to no dialogue. One of the more epic sequences in the show's history happened at the end of Season One, with the launch of a raft that the castaways hoped would lead to their rescue. For nearly five minutes, Giacchino and his orchestra build to a crescendo as the raft crew say their goodbyes (mostly unheard by us) to the people they - and we - have grown to know so well during the season.

"That's one of my favorite scenes in the entire series," says Giacchino. "I remember that at that point in the first season, watching that scene with no music behind it, feeling as though I know these people and I've been working with them for a while, and I wanted this thing they were doing to succeed, and I wanted something that felt emotional and epic and it just worked."

Giacchino, who has scored as many as 24 hours of "Lost" in a single season, in addition to his film work, has the process down to a science. Though Lindelof and company will refer to him in their scripts, Giacchino doesn't like to read them, or to have any knowledge of what's coming.

"The way that I score (an episode) is I watch it with (no advance knowledge), and then when I think there should be music, I stop and write music for that scene, not knowing what's going to happen next," he says. "'Lost' is such a thematic show that I'm always afraid that if I know something's going to happen at the end, I'll subconsciously write something in where someone who's astute will go, 'Oh, he used so-and-so's theme, that must mean so-and-so is coming back!'"

He has two days to write and orchestrate each score, then a third day to record it with the 37-piece orchestra he uses on the show. Though that's small compared to some of the orchestras he's used on his movies ("Ratatouille" and "The Incredibles" used upwards of 90 musicians), it's still a huge number for a weekly series budget, and "a huge luxury for someone who does what I do."

Lindelof says he's never had to fight his studio bosses for the money to employ Giacchino and his musicians on a weekly basis, since "They wanted to sell the show as cinematic and having a movie-quality score week in and week out was a big part of that."

On a regular basis, McCreary works with a smaller complement of musicians, usually between nine and 10, but when he's requested a full orchestra for some of the series' more important episodes, "I don't need to put up a fight for it. The episodes that require an orchestral presence are self-evident, and everybody at Sci Fi and the producers know it's money well-spent."

In the most recent "Battlestar" season finale that aired a week and a half ago (spoiler alert), McCreary knew that the climactic moment when the rag-tag space fleet finally made its way to Earth needed something extraordinary, even by the show's usual standards, and so he "suffered" for his art in writing a composition he called "Diaspora Oratorio." And because he had used a full orchestra so often in previous episodes "that the presence of the orchestra alone was not enough to make a musical statement about the impact of this moment," he got permission to hire a full choir to accompany, in Samoan and Latin, certain key points in the score.

Because so many television shows are either employing an all-song soundtrack or quick-and-dirty synthesized music, both men recognize that what they do is a dying, unappreciated artform.

"One of the most fascinating parts of the entertainment business is watching these musicians come together to play something they've never seen before, and play it so well," says Giacchino. "It's an artistic kind of portion in the entertainment business that's been diminished."

McCreary has started up his own blog, in which he goes into elaborate detail about the process of scoring each episode, and he recently played, with his regular stable of musicians, two sold-out concert performances of "Battlestar" music at the Roxy theater in Los Angeles that he says drew fans from as far as London, Malaysia and Australia.

"For me," says McCreary, "it's an opportunity to show that it's still possible to write music for television - on a deadline and budget that would make composers for film weep - that's intelligent and artistic and something that is worth a second viewing."

"They give me great freedom," says Giacchino. "I would argue that a lot of the music that I write on the show is music that no other producers in the world would let me do on their television show. Most television, the music is very much the same from show to show. Whereas on 'Lost,' I've been given so much freedom to kind of go where I want to go: weird references to things like Lutoslawski and Shostakovich. To be able to do that on a television show, it's the greatest thing in the world."

For more conversation with Michael Giacchino and Bear McCreary, click here.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com, or by writing him at 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J. 07102-1200.